Everett
The First Act
Friday, October 30th, 2009
It was the middle of August; there were four of us packed into a car headed for Arlington. Shane, Sam, and I rode with our mutual friend to take a long awaited vacation in the Dallas metroplex. Over the summer, our elusive Spirit Fire project had undergone a transformation and, in doing so, had acquired a newly designed website. Its creator, Ashley McQuaid, participates in the ministry by monitoring this new site, and she contributed to our old site with a guest essay and was baptized by myself in July, for which she should be congratulated. The task she had issued to the three of us was simple: come up with a mission synopsis to display on the secondary home page. Leave it to three college students on a road trip to turn that activity into an unachievable dream. We decided to knock it out before the vacation got rolling, for fear that we would forget about it for weeks and then get bogged down after classes resumed. I opened my laptop, and made a humorous rip at our mission statement: “He took the world’s hoagies. Now we must retake the hoagies’ world.” Whether it was from a delirium of too many hours in the car together or maybe from too little sleep, we laughed too hard to continue with any seriousness. We know ourselves far too well, and we did, in fact, push it aside for too long. As such, it is now November and we are finally inaugurating the site. Welcome!
For those of you joining us without knowledge of our previous site, I will provide a summary of our path to this point. A year ago, we founded www.absolutechristianity.org to push forward with a mission of spiritual revival. As one could expect, we found it difficult to find time to meet, since we not only went to different colleges, but lived in three separate states, New York, Missouri, and Texas. To that degree, we only achieved success in writing a handful of essays, the final number rounding out at fifteen by the time the site became dormant. Early on, we met over a break from classes to discuss what would become a separate entity from the website. We agreed, after much deliberation, on a ministry called the Spirit Fire Revolution. Its purpose: to reignite global enthusiasm for faith in God.
From three nineteen year old students.
Sound sort of… hilarious? Sure. And rather than force-feed you the starry-eyed optimism that I tried at first, I will attempt to explain the rationale behind our charge. We grew up in a society that mocks faith, blinds people from participating in intellectual discourse, and thrives on allowing human beings to behave in their most primal states without cause for remorse. We learned of Jesus in a culture where Christianity is a hobby for Sunday mornings, where men and women yearn to blend into the mesh rather than bring forth their religious convictions, and where the message behind the faith has become so watered down that most churches don’t even help procure a future for Christ-followers.
I am not daunted by the magnitude of the task at hand. I am terrified of the prospect of having to remain silent.
This movement is not for feel-good preachers, nor ‘fire and brimstone’ accusers. We are not called to be quiet or to hold animosity and judgement. We, as Followers of the Way, must try to help mold the body into what it should be. It is time for us to stop this half-hearted lifestyle of following and pursue the act of absolute Christianity.
This is a challenge to all followers and an invitation to all non-followers. Help us bring faith out of docility and instill in it a sense of power, compassion, and dignity.
He took the world’s sin. Now we must retake sin’s world.
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